The present invention broadly relates to a new and improved method of, and apparatus for, processing flat products, especially printed products, arriving in an imbricated product formation.
In its more specific aspects, the invention relates particularly to a new and improved method of, and apparatus for, processing flat products, especially printed products, arriving in an imbricated formation in which the products are wound-up to form a product package for storing the same and in which the products are again unwound from the product package for further processing.
At times throughout this disclosure reference to such method and apparatus will simply generally be made in terms of measures for accomplishing such processing. Equally, while the description to follow, as a matter of convenience, refers to the processing of printed products, obviously other types of products can be conveniently handled, and therefore, the use of this term is not to be construed in a limiting sense in any way whatsoever, but merely is to be viewed as an exemplary and desirable field of application for the inventive measures.
For the intermediate storage of printed products arriving in an imbricated formation it is known, for example, from German Patent Publication No. 3,123,888 and the cognate British Patent Publication No. 2,081,230 to wind-up the imbricated product formation upon a winding core. For removing the printed products from the stored product package the imbricated formation is again unwound in a direction opposite to the wind-up direction.
However, the printed products assume a position in the unwound imbricated stream which is different from that in the arriving imbricated stream. The edge of the arriving imbricated printed products which lies on top and forms the leading edge in the latter, while still lying on top after the unwinding operation now forms the trailing edge. Such a changed product position, however, in most cases is undesirable for further processing.